PlayStation.Blog

Warhawk v1.1 Patch and Arbiters

Hey everyone, its been awhile since I last made a post here. The team and I have been cranking away on support and updates for Warhawk and I thought it’d be a good idea to give you all an update as to what the hell we’ve been up to.

So … since my last post, we’ve launched Warhawk in South-East Asia, Korea and Japan — which now means our community spans 15 different languages!

We’ve also been working on a lot of fixes, server-side updates and client patches. Because lets face it, while the team and I were really happy with our launch and players around the globe were having a blast playing, there were some problems that players encountered once we rolled the game out to the masses (stats, connection issues, etc). I’m not going to sugar coat that with a strawberry-flavored, pink, PR candy shell – it’s the truth.

All of that said, we have been hard at work to address the big issues that our Warhawk community currently is experiencing. We have already addressed the majority of our stats-related issues with the deployment of a few server-side updates. These were updates that we rolled out “on our end” without any of the players having to download an actual Warhawk patch. These updates also fixed many of the connection issues. But not all.

The remaining core updates have to be delivered as a client-side patch, hence my next topic – the impending global release of our Warhawk v1.1 patch.

Now we actually have been working on 2 patches — but I’ll talk about the second patch in my next post.

The first update, the v1.1 patch, addresses the critical issues with stats and connectivity. Those two points were the focus of this patch and while they may seem small, they had a huge impact on our player base.

The v1.1 patch is in the last stages of testing right now and should be deployed worldwide by the end of October. Here’s a change list for the server-side updates that we’ve already made as well as what’s upcoming in v1.1:

These updates make a huge improvement to the stats and connection issues that some players were experiencing. The team and I know how much of a pisser it is to not get the award your worked for or how frustrating it can be to try and get on to some of the busy, popular servers.

The v1.1 patch makes the world a much happier place … ok, maybe not the world, but at least the Warhawk universe :)

We are also responding to complaints about players that are stat-padding, griefing or just messing with the Warhawk community in general. This is incredibly frustrating for players and we are not taking it lightly!!

A few weeks ago one of our mods made a post on the Warhawk forums letting people know that kind of behavior will not be tolerated. That was just a warning. Now, to protect the Warhawk community and preserve the legitimacy of our worldwide leader boards, I am announcing the existence of the Warhawk Arbiters. These are members of our online services groups in both the US and Europe that will be overseeing the leader boards, community stats and will also be “in the trenches” joining game servers for first-hand observation. Their PSN account names will remain a secret. They have the authority to warn players, call a player out to prove his or her skills, or render judgment … think Judge Dredd.

Judgment can take many forms, an email warning, forum post, a kick, temporary/permanent ban, or the Warhawk Arbiters can request your Warhawk stats be “cleansed.”

There are thousands and thousands of good, well-mannered players. We will not tolerate a small few messing with our global community. So be warned!!

That’s it for now; I’ll be posting again very soon to discuss the v1.2 patch…